On the morning of August 30, 1777, George Washington dictated a letter to John Hancock, the president of the Continental Congress. As he finished his dispatch, an update on the British position, commotion erupted at headquarters. At approximately 10:00 a.m. a mounted American came galloping into camp, bringing twenty-four Redcoats along with him. Washington quickly appended a note to his letter to Hancock: “This minute twenty-four British prisoners arrived taken by Captain Lee of the Light-Horse.”1 Lee rode off again that afternoon. The next day he returned with another nineteen prisoners of war.
Only a few months before, Henry Lee had never been on a battlefield. Now, at the tumultuous end of 1777 in the stark early months of the following year, he emerged as a hero to an army and a nation much in need of one. Lee’s success came with a price, though. While his admiring superiors helped his career along, his jealous peer officers, offended by his ambition and arrogance, plotted to snuff it out. In fact, as the dragoons were riding to Washington’s aid in Wilmington on August 24, Lee, for reasons now lost to history, was charged with disobedience of orders. The accusations amounted to little. A court martial found the captain not guilty and labeled the charges, brought by his peers, as “groundless and vexatious.” Washington concurred with the acquittal.2
There was little time for Lee to stew over the ordeal. Howe and his men, now past the seasickness that both they and their mounts had acquired during the journey from New York, were at last on the march to Philadelphia.
Washington relied on the light horse to shadow and harass the enemy and gather intelligence on their advance. On August 30, Washington wrote to Bland stressing the importance of “a diligent and constant watch being kept on the motions of the enemy.” If the British began their march towards Philadelphia, the dragoons were to apprise Washington at once. He instructed their commander to keep “small guards and constant patrols, both of horse and foot, on the flanks and in front of the enemy, as near to them as prudence will permit, so that they cannot possibly move any way, without your having information of it.”3
The first fight came at Cooch’s Bridge, twelve miles southwest of Wilmington. There, on September 3, Howe’s men overpowered a force of American infantry and militia.4 After a short rest, the British force, supplemented by Hessians nearly thirteen hundred strong, continued their northward trek. Washington rushed to cut them off, setting the bulk of his force across the swiftly flowing but shallow Brandy Wine River at Chadds Ford, where the surrounding heights, combined with the breadth of the river, provided a favorable spot for the Americans to stop the British advance. Washington, worried that the enemy might cross the river farther north, deployed his men at passable fords along the river. The information regarding spots where they could possibly cross was provided by Bland. But in his scouting, the major missed one ford, known as Jeffries, seven miles north of the American force. And there, on the morning of September 11, a contingent of Redcoats, led by Charles Cornwallis, swung around the American right flank and across the river.5
Upon hearing this, Washington sent divisions north in an attempt to block the British near Birmingham Friends Meeting House, a stone Quaker church just east of Jeffries Ford. From there, in the late summer heat, under clear skies, after six British bayonet charges, the rebels fled. In the following days the armies continued to skirmish. After retreating across the Schuylkill River towards Philadelphia and then crossing back again, Washington was set to reengage Howe near the White Horse Tavern, twenty-five miles west of the American capital, on September 16. But after the fighting began, a torrential downpour intervened, soaking the Americans’ musket cartridges, effectively disarming Washington’s men and ending the battle.6
With a British attack on the American capital now unavoidable, Congress prepared to depart Philadelphia as Howe crossed the Schuylkill, his sights set on the city. Along his path, at Daverser’s Ferry along the river, sat several mills stored with flour. On September 18, before the British could seize them, Washington commanded Lee and Alexander Hamilton to destroy the mills. Accompanied by six mounted soldiers, they rode down a long hill then sloped to a wooden bridge spanning the canal which powered the mill’s water wheel. Once across, Hamilton commandeered two large flat-bottomed boats; should the British appear, these would provide an escape across the river.7
As the Americans set to work, warning shots rang out, fired by two sentries they had placed on the hill. The enemy appeared over the horizon, charging after the guards and towards the rest of the party. Hamilton and four others leapt into one of the boats; during the confusion caused by the surprise appearance of the British, the other craft drifted off. Now Lee made a spur-of-the-moment decision. He and the other two dragoons, rather than joining Hamilton on the river, would charge back across the bridge toward the British and escape via horse. Thus they hoped to draw the enemy’s fire away from Hamilton and his cohorts, who at this point had splashed into the river and were fighting its rapid currents. Lee, his fellow dragoons, and the two patrols sprinted past the Redcoats, who opened up a stream of fire from their carbines. Lee and his men escaped unharmed.8
But in their absence, the guns were now turned on Hamilton. One of his companions was killed, another wounded. The lieutenant-colonel, leaping into the Schuylkill, was able to swim to safety and escape back to headquarters. Lee was ignorant of his friend’s fate. After the danger had passed, he sent a note to Washington informing the general of the failed mission and the probability that his valued aide-de-camp had been lost. As Washington read the letter, an exasperated Hamilton appeared to relay unfortunate news of his own: the British had seized the mills, plus the boats, and Lee was possibly dead. Washington, without saying a word, handed Hamilton Lee’s letter.9
Any joy brought by this discovery and the reunion of the two officers was short lived. That night Hamilton wrote to Hancock in Philadelphia warning that, “If Congress have not yet left Philadelphia, they ought to do it immediately without fail. . . .”10 On September 19, the American government departed its capital and fled to the town of Lancaster before eventually moving on to York. On September 26, Howe and his army marched into Philadelphia uncontested, to the ovation of American loyalists.
But Washington would not cede the city easily. Howe had settled the British force, other than a few garrisons, near Germantown, just northwest of the city. There Washington hoped to take him by surprise with a dawn attack in October. But despite a fiercely contested fight, the endeavor, ill-coordinated on account of fog, failed.11
Entrenched in Philadelphia, Howe faced a new challenge. Though Congress and its patriot supporters had departed, a surge of loyalists and the arrival of the British soldiers swelled the city’s population and strained its resources. In order to feed the occupied capital’s population, Howe needed a clear path along the Delaware River for stores to arrive from Britain.
But that waterway was obstructed by a series of jagged wooden defenses known as chevaux-de-frise. And the Americans, who had built these iron-tipped, wooden barriers at the onset of the war, still controlled Forts Mifflin, Mercer, and Billingsport along Howe’s would-be supply line. From these outposts they could rake the British with fire if they attempted to navigate or dismantle the obstacles. As a result, the occupying army was forced to transport goods over a circuitous land route. Howe had no choice but to attack and remove the Americans from these forts.
Lee was ordered to cross the Schuylkill and apprise Washington of the enemy’s plan, and when possible disrupt it. Riding across the Pennsylvania countryside, he discovered that the British had a small number of men stationed on Carpenter’s Island, at the mouth of the river, ferrying cargo in to Philadelphia. If the flow of goods through Carpenter’s Island was not stopped, Lee told Washington, “supplies of provision will be as abundant, as if the fleet lay off the wharfs of the city.” He also informed the commander in chief that locals near the town of Chester were selling their cattle to the British army in violation of laws passed by Congress. Lee sent dragoons to end this illicit trade and promised, with characteristic confidence, the “endeavors to interrupt this connection, will be effectual.”12
While Lee continued to gather intelligence and disrupt the trade between Pennsylvanians and Howe’s men, he also encountered, pursued, and captured several members of a British foraging party. One of the prisoners, a Marylander, revealed during interrogation that a British attack on Fort Mifflin was imminent. Lee wrote to Washington with this information and appended a bit of advice. If the Americans were to seize Carpenter’s Island, Lee suggested, the floating batteries that the British were constructing to attack the rebel outposts could be “totally blasted.” With the island in American hands, “we most assuredly can put a stop to their favorite scheme. . . .” and stop the flow of provisions into Philadelphia.13
Washington vetoed Lee’s plan, and despite a last-ditch effort to save Fort Mercer after Mifflin had fallen, by November 18 the British had cleared the Delaware for transport. Less remarkable than Lee’s advice was the fact that he felt free to offer it. After little more than a year of service, the twenty-two-year-old captain had an open line of communication with and was comfortable offering advice to the commanding general of the entire army.14 And Washington, in a sign of his increasing appreciation for Lee’s talents, did not bat an eye.
In the fall Lee and a fellow soldier named Warring passed through North Wales, a Welsh settlement in the woods north of Philadelphia, to which Daniel Wister, a resident of Germantown, had fled with his family when the British army approached the city. He had taken refuge in the farm home of a relative, Hannah Foulke. American soldiers passing through the area often quartered in or visited the house, where Wister’s sixteen-year-old daughter Sally, to pass her days in exile, wrote letters to a friend, and—once the mail was disrupted—transferred her observations on the war and the men fighting it to a journal.
Wister jotted down a rare casual and altogether unimpressed portrait of the young captain when he visited on November 2. “Lee sings prettily and talks a great deal,” she recorded. He professed his affection for turkey hash and fried hominy, his love for Virginia, and distaste for Maryland. The teenager teasingly mocked the Virginian’s accent, laughed at his home state, and disapproved of Lee’s insistence on discussing gastronomical matters. Wister snickered at Lee and his companions, “I took great delight in teasing them. They were not, I am certain almost, first-rate gentlemen.”15
Despite the string of American losses, a ray of hope had emerged in the North. In October, rebels led by General Horatio Gates and a young major general named Benedict Arnold trapped and forced the surrender of a British force in upstate New York. The victory convinced monarchs in France and also Spain to lend their full support to the American cause.16 In the advance of the move to Valley Forge, Lee was sent back across the Delaware to New Jersey to aid General Nathanael Greene. Reports of British foraging parties there had Washington worried that the enemy was plotting to retake the state. Greene needed cavalry to combat British raids. But after a week of riding patrols, by early December, Lee was on his way back east and once again near the main army in Pennsylvania.
With winter approaching, Howe remained in the comfort of Philadelphia. Washington’s selection of a winter camp, on the other hand, was fraught with political and logistical difficulties. The Continental Congress, hoping to return from its exile, had asked that the army remain as close to the city as possible. And the government of Pennsylvania preferred that they keep a safe distance from the lush farmland to the north of the city, while Washington needed to be close enough to keep tabs on Howe’s army and contest any raids in the surrounding countryside.
After a debate with his generals beginning in late October, Washington settled on a densely wooded area some twenty miles north of Philadelphia, west of the Schuylkill River. The forests, Washington hoped, would provide the raw materials for the Americans to construct huts in which to wait out the winter. But by the time the eleven thousand American soldiers, with women and children in tow, arrived in Valley Forge, that winter had arrived.17
Improperly supplied, the army now faced a great test. Food grew scarce. Paltry provisions of salt pork were barely enough to keep body and soul together. Snows came, and icy winds swept across the hillside area where the soldiers hurriedly threw together their dwellings. What little clothing the men had was in rags. Many were forced to go without boots or shoes, their bleeding feet leaving crimson tracks in the snow. There were not even blankets for the shivering men to sleep under during the frigid nights. Influenza and dysentery swept through the camp; its occupants died by thousands. Morale did not merely sink; the army teetered on the edge of complete collapse. In dire correspondence to Congress, Washington warned that in the absence of “some great and capital change” the army would “starve, dissolve or disperse.”18
Lee did everything in his power to ensure these things did not come to pass. The 5th Troop, increasingly independent from Bland, would not remain at Valley Forge that winter. Instead they would alert Washington to any attempt by the British to advance on Valley Forge, protect American farmers in the region from any British depredations, and gather as much forage as possible for the starving soldiers back in camp.
Lee initially staged his operations from Randor Friends Meeting House, built by Quakers in 1717, a stone structure that the American army had commandeered in Delaware County, near Philadelphia.19 The area, and in particular the community of nearby Newton-Square, where the roads to the towns of Chester, Wilmington, and Philadelphia converged, were favorite targets for British scavenging. In the final weeks of 1777, British dragoons made off with over one hundred horses, “robbing and plundering every person they came across” and subjecting those living in the residences of Newton-Square to “barbarity and cruelty.”20 One of Lee’s initial responsibilities in the winter of 1778 was to put an end to this.
The 5th Troop was hardly in better supply than their brethren back at Valley Forge. After a year of constant riding and skirmishing, Lee’s men were in dire need of new saddles, spurs, boots, and even carbines. With twelve of his thirty-five men in need even of new horses, Lee complained to Washington about the superiority of the British mounts.21 But none of this hindered their success.
Riding constant patrols on the edge of Philadelphia, swooping in on unsuspecting British detachments, by the end of January Lee and his men had apprehended a staggering 124 enemy prisoners and had only lost a single horse in the process.22 The officers of the 5th Troop also served as emissaries to farmers living in between the British and American lines. Together they settled on a designated amount of food to be delivered directly to Lee in exchange for protection from unchecked foraging.
Lee posted at Scott’s Farm, 250 acres of abandoned farmland west of Philadelphia, in the middle of which stood an expansive stone house. From there he carried on his successful hunts, ambushing British supply convoys and riding off with the Redcoats’ food and clothing, redirecting it to the starving and shivering soldiers at Valley Forge to replace their maggot-filled firecakes and self-constructed moccasins of cowhide.23
The fifty square miles that constituted the 5th Troop’s patrol was a perilous place for Redcoats; the name “Lee” elicited anger amongst the British command and cheers among the American soldiers. By late January 1778, Howe had had enough. “At 11 o’ clock at night, 40 dragoons were detached by a long roundabout way to seize a rebel dragoon captain by the name of Lee, who has alarmed us quite often by his boldness and who is stationed fifteen miles from here,” Captain Frederick von Munchhausen, one of Howe’s aides, wrote in his dairy on the nineteenth of that month.24
That night, under Howe’s orders, the 17th Regiment of Dragoons, captained by Major Richard Crewe, in tandem with members of the Queen’s Rangers, a loyalist dragoon company, set out for Scott’s Farm. Once the party, numbering 130 men, reached the outskirts of the property, likely with the aid of an American informant, they clashed with and easily overpowered four mounted guards. Riding on, they reached the stone house as morning arrived and the sun rose. Inside, Lee had only nine men at his disposal, including John Jameson, a visitor from the 1st Dragoons. When the Americans were startled out of sleep by the ruckus outside, one soldier, a panicked quartermaster sergeant, fled the house.25
Now Lee, stranded with only eight men, faced a fight against an army. These were odds the captain liked. Hurriedly he rallied his men; they bolted the doors, grabbed their muskets and pistols, and rushed from window to window, giving the impression that there were far more men inside than the few there.
The British charged forward but were blasted back. Those who evaded the musket balls were greeted with slashing broad swords. Finding entry to the house impossible, the startled invaders ran to the nearby stables, where Lee’s horses were resting; but this was a failure, too. The Americans, in a coordinated effort, continued to fire; a British retreat was ordered.
During the melee a flamboyant young British cavalry officer named Banastre Tarleton, who had a flair for the dramatic rivaling Lee’s own, made a final charge at the house. Ferdinand O’Neal, a French-born member of the 5th Troop, appeared at a window and placed the muzzle of his pistol near Tarleton’s head. When O’Neal flicked his firing pan down and pressed back his trigger, the weapon misfired. “You have missed it my lad for this time,” Tarleton shouted with a smile as he wheeled his horse around and trotted off under fire.26
As disorder set in among the British during their withdrawal, Lee cockily admonished his counterpart, Crewe. “Comrade, shame on you, that you don’t have your men under better discipline,” he roared. “Come a little closer, we will soon manage it together!”27 Left behind in the wake of the enemy’s retreat were two dead Redcoats and another four wounded. A number of abandoned arms and cloaks were quickly scavenged by the victors. The only American casualty was a slight injury to the hand of Lee’s deputy, Lieutenant William Lindsay, though the four privates who had been patrolling the house, plus the fleeing quartermaster sergeant, were unaccounted for, and four horses were lost.
With the smoke cleared, Lee sent a summary of the action to the commander in chief. “The contest was very warm; the British dragoons trusting to their vast superiority in number, attempted to force their way into the house,” he wrote. “In this they were baffled by the bravery of our men.”28 The news of the gallant little stand thrilled Washington, mired in the gloom of Valley Forge. In his general orders for January 20, shared with the entire army, Washington, citing Lee’s “vigilance,” heaped praise on the young captain and his companions: “The Commander in Chief returns his warmest thanks to Capt’n Lee & Officers & men of his troop for the victory, which by their superior bravery and address, they gain’d over a party of the enemy’s dragoons, who trusting in their numbers—and concealing their march by a circuitous road attempted to surprise them in their quarters. . . .”29
This approbation apparently insufficient, Washington also personally recognized Lee by letter, noting that although thanks had been extended earlier in the day, “for the late instance of your gallant behavior, I cannot resist the inclination I feel to repeat them again in this manner.” Then, hinting at things over the horizon, Washington continued, “I needed no fresh proof of your merit, to bear you in remembrance—I waited only for the proper time and season to shew it—these I hope are not far off.”30
The exchange at Scott’s Farm was tactically insignificant. It was a minor skirmish in a war filled with great battles. But the fact that a deeply outnumbered American garrison could repel the attack of a numerically superior British force provided welcome inspiration and optimism for the continentals as they weathered that depressing winter in southeastern Pennsylvania.
It also demonstrated Lee’s cool demeanor and ability to improvise under fire, endearing the captain to his general. It was the first of Lee’s fabled exploits. Meanwhile, across enemy lines, anger at the rebel dragoon captain raged. “Early in the morning this captain Lee was indeed surprised by us,” Howe’s aide Munchhausen observed, “he himself retreated with a few men into a massive building out of which our men could not force him.”31
The excitement brought by Lee’s exploits, though, did little to relieve the suffering at Valley Forge, where the shortage of supplies had reached a head. Washington himself described it as a “fatal crisis.”32 Broken wagons and incompetent commissary combined with the winter weather had resulted in a scarcity of bread and meat. The suffering was so great and famine seemingly so imminent, the dissolution of the army was approaching, if mutiny did not rend it before then.
In desperation, Washington begged the “virtuous yeomanry” of Americans to prepare cattle for sale to the army and orchestrated a “grand forage,” sending Generals Nathanael Greene and Anthony Wayne to scour Pennsylvania and New Jersey, respectively, for supplies.33 In the middle of February, Lee and members of the 5th Troop joined the campaign, riding south to the areas of Dover, Delaware, and Head of Elk, Maryland. There, Lee was to secure food and forage from the surrounding country with great speed, and to impress wagons when necessary. “If any resources can be derived thence towards the relief of our distresses,” Washington implored Lee, “it will be infinitely desirable.”34
Lee, aided by Colonel Henry Hollingsworth, whose step-brother was a merchant in Baltimore and familiar with the area, assigned teams of horses to secure any available wagons in the area and send them on to Dover to collect salt provisions. Meanwhile his men scouted the area, collecting “all cattle fat for slaughter, all horses suitable for draught or dragoon service.” The operation showed Lee’s meticulous attention to detail and diplomacy, as he kept books on his acquisitions and, per Washington’s instructions, treated the region’s inhabitants with grace, guaranteeing that they were compensated during his efforts to “drain this country of superfluous forage & provision.”35
The effort met with mixed results. Wayne had little success, but Greene and Lee fared somewhat better. On February 16 Greene sent fifty head of cattle to Valley Forge. Lee, though he had trouble securing wagons, delaying the arrival of salt provisions, dispatched a drove of cattle to headquarters on the twenty-second. But complicating Lee’s efforts was his discovery that the southern reaches of Delaware were dotted with loyalists and deserters from the American army. Those living near the marshes he swept were, in his words, “friends to the enemies of America” who, instead of selling their cattle to the army, planned to wait until the spring when the British would offer higher prices.36
Months before the crisis at Valley Forge, both Washington and Congress, in a sign of the esteem in which Greene was held across the military and government, had urged him to take the vacant role of the army’s quartermaster general. Though he had apprehensions about abandoning a battlefield post for an administrative one, in March Greene eventually relented, bringing an energy and organization to the position that began to relieve the strain faced at camp.37 With the arrival of spring, the army had lost two thousand men but remained intact. And, incredibly, thanks to the night-time drilling of Prussian General Baron von Steuben, the soldiers who had survived the ordeal of the winter were prepared for the battles to come.38 Lee, his foraging tasks finished, rejoined the main army at the end of March.
As Lee returned to Valley Forge to prepare for the spring campaigns—rumors were swirling that the British planned to evacuate Philadelphia—Alexander Hamilton sent out a request to Stephen Moylan, the army’s captain of cavalry. The commander in chief was in need of a new officer and company of horses. “They are wanted,” Hamilton explained, “to relieve Capt. Lee, and perform the duties his parties did.”39
Influenced by a fondness for the young man dating back years, impressed by his martial skills and daring, Washington had decided that rather than scouting enemy lines or searching for cattle or wheat, Lee belonged in his own inner circle. The duty of transmitting this offer fell to Hamilton, who extended it in person upon his friend’s return to Valley Forge.
This was an incredible offer. It meant that Lee, now so accustomed to danger and deprivation, would no longer have to worry about shelter or sustenance. The whiz of bullets and boom of cannons would be replaced by the shuffling of paperwork. It represented a major promotion, and a chance to join a family that included Hamilton and other young warriors. A chance to leave the hardships of the war and join this clique would have been an easy choice for most ambitious soldiers. For Lee, however, it was a difficult decision. The glory he craved would come on the battlefield, not at headquarters.
So he declined.
In a letter composed on March 31, a flattered Lee graciously offered thanks to Washington. Quoting Joseph Addison’s Cato (“It is not in mortals to command success”), Lee confessed that the position he had been offered would accelerate his military education, serve as a tutelage in American politics, draw him closer to Washington, and bring “true and unexpected joy to my parents and friends.”
But, Lee wrote, “Permit me to premise that I am wedded to my sword, and that my secondary object in the present war, is military reputation.” Lee’s place in the revolution was in the arena. Glory was in short supply, and penning dispatches was not the way to win it. Laurels were not likely to be won by delivering messages or treating with Congress and state governments. Lee’s destiny, he was convinced, was in combat. “I possess a most affectionate friendship for my soldiers. . . a zeal for the honor of the Cavalry, and [an] opinion, that I should render m[ore] real service to your Excellency’s arms.”40
Most officers could have only dreamed of a niche in Washington’s personal staff. Lee, when offered such an opportunity, turned it down to pursue his dreams of military fame. And Washington did not begrudge him in the least for his choice.
Responding to Lee’s rebuff, the commander in chief effused that “the undisguised manner in which you express yourself cannot but strengthen my good opinion of you—as the offer on my part was purely the result of a high Sense of your merit and as I would by no means divert you from a Career in which you promise yourself greater happiness from it’s affording more frequent opportunities of acquiring military fame, I entreat you to pursue your own Inclinations as if nothing had passed on this subject.”41
In the months ahead, Lee would do as Washington suggested.